I've seen multiple people who recently, by one way or another, have a phone that have the bootloader unlocked, device rooted, and a recovery flashed...but for some reason you don't have a ROM flashed and your phone won't boot up past the bootanimation. If you're in that situation, this will hopefully help solve that issue.

What this thread is designed to do is inform you how to flash a ROM.zip file onto your seemingly bricked HTC One S device that you can't boot up. As you know, usually if your phone boots up, you just plug it into your computer, mount it, and just drag and drop the file. Well, for those of you that have no way to do that, I hopefully have a fix for you!

- Ensure in Recovery that your phone shows "Unmount /sdcard/" and "Unmount /system/" (If they do not show this automatically, just press each one once respectively as pressing just toggles Mount and Unmount)

- This is probably the most important part - Still in Command Prompt, type "adb push ROM.zip /sdcard/ROM.zip" replacing ROM with the EXACT name of the ROM file and including the .zip piece on both ends. This may take a minute or two...or four, but you will see a message in Command Prompt saying something like <12345678kb to 1234567kb>. That is just telling you that the file was pushed properly. (I did not include that message in the picture below)

- Once this has completed, unplug your phone from your computer and close the Command Prompt window

- Back in Recovery, go to Recovery's main screen and Do a "Factory Reset", "Wipe Cache Partition", and "Wipe Dalvik Cache [which is in the Advanced menu of Recovery]"

- When these are all done, from Recovery's main screen, select "Install ZIP from SD Card" and then "Choose file from SD Card" and select the ROM.zip file you just pushed from your computer to the SD Card. If you do not see the file, go back to Mounts and Storage and toggle them to say "Mount /sdcard/" and "Mount /system/" and then go back and try to fine the ROM.zip file. If you still do not see it, it was not pushed correctly...go back and ensure you were letter for letter with the name and the file path.

- Once the screen in Recovery says "Install from SD Card Complete.", go back to Recovery's main screen yet again and select "Reboot system now" - If your device fails to Install the ROM.zip, I had this happen to me. You must push the CWM SuperSU ZIP (the .zip file is found at the end of this thread)file as outlined before and Install THAT .zip file in Recovery, then reboot Recovery and Install the ROM.zip from SD Card.

- Let your phone have some time to boot up...initial boot from installing a new ROM have histories of taking a couple minutes.

- You should now be on a working HTC One S running whatever ROM you decided to flash.

Conclusion:
I hope you got your phone working again and I hope this helped. Please feel free to critique this guide as I am quite new to the HTC One S, but not new to rooting phones at all. If you have questions, please comment and ask or don't hesitate to shoot me a PM...I'm more than willing to help.

I hope this helped all of you who may be in the situation I was in and the situation I've seen a couple of people in.

Thanks for this information goes out to doktortaru, strker45, and torxx.

thanks for the detailed guide! the issue im having is not being able to mount /sdcard in recovery. I can successfully adb push the zip to the sdcard but when i try to flash in recovery, it gives me error mounting /sdcard.
can you post a quick guide on how to flash via fastboot the boot.img and system.img from the RUU? i think thats the only option i have at this point. and thanks again for this guide!

thanks for the detailed guide! the issue im having is not being able to mount /sdcard in recovery. I can successfully adb push the zip to the sdcard but when i try to flash in recovery, it gives me error mounting /sdcard.
can you post a quick guide on how to flash via fastboot the boot.img and system.img from the RUU? i think thats the only option i have at this point. and thanks again for this guide!

When you click to mount /sdcard/ before you push the ROM over, what does Recovery tell you? What error is it?

So when I press mount sdcard it shows me Error mounting /sdcard. Same message when I try to format the sd card.
Adb seems.to push the file to sd card successfully in cmd. However when I go to install from zip it gives me "Cannot mount /sdcard"
I tried partitioning the sd card in recovery but that doesn't seem to have any effect.

So when I press mount sdcard it shows me Error mounting /sdcard. Same message when I try to format the sd card.
Adb seems.to push the file to sd card successfully in cmd. However when I go to install from zip it gives me "Cannot mount /sdcard"
I tried partitioning the sd card in recovery but that doesn't seem to have any effect.

XDA Developers was founded by developers, for developers. It is now a valuable resource for people who want to make the most of their mobile devices, from customizing the look and feel to adding new functionality.Are you a developer?